Roemer sees glimmer of W.H. hope

The GOP’s white-bread presidential primary is about to get a dash of Tabasco.

Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer will announce Thursday in Baton Rouge that he is forming an exploratory committee, he told POLITICO.

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“I should be president or somebody better than I should be,” Roemer said in an interview. “And the only way to make sure of that is to make [my opponents] go around me, through me or over me in the primaries.”

While Roemer is a native son of a state that witnessed a miracle last year — the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl — he faces very long odds. A former Democratic member of Congress who switched to the GOP in 1991, midway through his single term as governor, Roemer has been largely absent from politics since consecutive failed gubernatorial runs. In Louisiana circles, he is a onetime political wunderkind who is remembered more for what he might have been than what he accomplished.

But Roemer explained that his experience at the helm of a small bank that didn’t get bailout money and doesn’t exert much political influence in Washington has him worried about the country and wanting to join the debate.

Testing out a line he said he will use while on a maiden trip to Iowa next week, Roemer said: “The nation is hurting with 9 percent unemployment, 9 percent underemployment and 5 percent of the people who have quit looking for jobs, yet Washington is a boom town — what’s wrong with that picture?”

The Louisianan indicated he would run as both a reformer and a populist, promising to limit his contributions to $100 per person, swear off PAC dollars and target what he depicted as the scourge of Big Money’s impact on politics.

Roemer, noting that he is a diabetic, said: “You are what you eat. And in politics, you are where you get your money. Presidents and politicians get their money from people who want something.”

He took swings at the political establishment from the right, railing against the new health care law, but also the left, decrying the Wall Street reform bill for not being tough enough.

His campaign theme will be “Free to Lead,” Roemer said, boasting: “I’m going to be independent from the Big Money, Wall Street money, special interest money; that’s going to be my mark in this campaign.”

The former governor’s Huey Long-meets-Jerry Brown campaign — minus the 1-800 number — will surely be dismissed by many GOP professionals. It is also already being mocked by Louisiana politicos who have long viewed Roemer as an eccentric underachiever.